House Rejects Ro Khanna’s Effort to Block US-Israel Military Integration

Khanna introduced an amendment to strike down the proposal on Thursday, but was met with widespread opposition.

By Shireen Akram-Boshar ,

Truthout

June 8, 2026

U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) questions U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on April 29, 2026 in Washington, DC.Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images

On Thursday, the House of Representatives pushed forward with a measure to increase military cooperation between the U.S. and Israel despite one congressman’s efforts to block the proposal.

The House Armed Services Committee held a marathon session Thursday on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) budget, concluding after midnight on Friday and ultimately approving $1.15 trillion for defense programs.

Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna (California) attempted to remove Section 224 of the NDAA, which calls for an increase in military cooperation between the U.S. and Israel, but was met with opposition, including from fellow Democrats.

Section 224 of the NDAA calls for an increase in military technical cooperation between the U.S. and Israel’s defense industries, with the creation of a position in the Pentagon to “synchroniz[e] cooperative efforts,” and “expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation.” This would also entail more cooperation on missile defense, AI, and other technology, “joint training exercises,” and more collaboration across “government, private sector, and academic institutions” in the U.S. and Israel.

Khanna introduced an amendment to strike down the proposal on Thursday, but was met with widespread opposition, with only a single Democrat voicing approval.

Khanna attempted to appeal to lawmakers across the political spectrum in his remarks, saying, “Everyone in America – whether you’re a Republican, an independent or a Democrat – says that we need to tell Netanyahu that America calls the shots, not the prime minister of any other country.”

Khanna was referring to a letter penned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that endorsed the measure and called for the U.S.-Israel relationship “to move from aid recipient to partner” under a “new framework of joint defense cooperation.” Khanna claimed that Section 224 echoed Netanyahu’s demand.

“[Americans] want less cooperation and blank checks to Israel, not more. Only the United States Congress would dream up at this moment, ‘Let’s actually do more for Israel,’ not less,” Khanna said.

But eight committee members – including Democrats – spoke against Khanna’s amendment. They said that the creation of the liaison position would ensure U.S. supervision of the program, and that the technology-sharing would allow the U.S. to benefit from Israeli technology.

This technology has been developed through the subjugation of Palestinians – Gaza especially has been used as a “testing ground” for Israeli technology. Since 2024, south Lebanon, too, has become a testing ground for Israeli weapons technologies.

Washington Rep. Adam Smith – the lead Democrat on the committee – said that he was “sympathetic” to Khanna’s argument. “Mr. Netanyahu insisted on this war with Iran that has strengthened Iran and weakened our position. I do not like his leadership of Israel or where he is going,” he said.

But Smith insisted that having a military partnership with Israel is useful “because Israel has actually been having to fight.”

“They have faced drone attacks and missile attacks. They have had to develop new technologies, technologies that we’ve benefitted from,” he continued.

Smith also stated that the framework was not new. “We have three existing programs right now where we do military cooperation with Israel to develop technologies. Those programs already exist,” he said.

Only Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-California) spoke in favor of the amendment. “The United States should have the same standards for Israel as we do for everyone else,” she said. “If any other country in the world had been credibly accused of violating U.S. and international law again and again, of killing tens of thousands of civilians, of blocking food and medicine from reaching a starving population, we would not be moving to deepen and permanently expand our military ties with them.”

But the lack of support from other Democrats is a reminder that the U.S. sees working more closely with Israel as in its own interests, too, not just Israel’s – and a long line of both Democratic and Republican presidents have maintained this position for decades.

We Should Not ‘Integrate’ Our Military With Any Foreign Nation!

by Ron Paul | Jun 9, 2026 | Antiwar.com

Not since the notorious 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) provided for indefinite detention of American citizens, has the annual funding bill been as misused as this year. Embedded in the bill is an insult to every American who values our national sovereignty. The NDAA’s Section 224, the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” would “integrate” the Israeli military with our own, fusing technology, production, intelligence-sharing, and more.

As Ben Freeman wrote last week in Responsible Statecraft:

“The US and Israel already work together heavily on missile defense, but this provision would greatly expand coordination to seemingly every area of defense tech, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more. It also proposes ‘network integration’ and ‘data fusion.’ In other words, the US military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data.”

It is hard to think of a more “America last” position than handing the keys to the Pentagon (and our intelligence community) to a foreign country.

The insanity of Section 224 is made even more clear with news over the weekend that the Pentagon has raised to “critical” the threat level of Israel spying on the United States and its officials!

We should not “integrate” our military with any foreign country or organization, but integrating with a country that is a “critical” espionage threat to our national security? How does this make any sense?

The “problem” for American lawmakers is that after the killing in Gaza and now Lebanon, the American people – particularly younger Americans – have turned sharply against the US relationship with Israel. This foreign entanglement has sucked billions from the US treasury over the decades, and it has sucked us into endless conflict in the Middle East, including the current US war on Iran.

Rather than listen to the will of their constituents, Congress has decided to defy the wishes of Americans in favor of the wishes of a foreign government. AIPAC largely controls our Congress and passing Section 224 would be a great victory for the foreign lobby.

It should come as no surprise that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorses Section 224. He may have written it for all we know!

Should Section 224 remain in the NDAA, it would essentially remove future Congresses from any role in determining what level of support, cooperation, and oversight should be included in the US relationship with Israel. It would be worse even than President Obama’s 10 year guaranteed US financial support for Israel. Funding would not only be on autopilot, but the US would be further drawn into Israel’s multiple wars with its neighbors. Worse even than backing up Israel in its regional wars, the wars themselves would become ours.

Americans must speak out against plans to integrate our military with any foreign country. What we should be doing is disentangling from these overseas obligations, whether they be NATO or support for Ukraine or backing Taiwan against China.

We already spend more than a trillion dollars a year on our own military and our national debt is nearing $40 trillion. Taking on the obligation to fight even more wars overseas will hasten our bankruptcy. Section 224 must be stricken from the NDAA and it is up to every American who cares about our sovereignty to demand that Congress do so.

Ron Paul is a former Republican congressman from Texas. He was the 1988 Libertarian Party candidate for president.

Higher Education Must Not Become a Research Arm of Militarized Power


Universities risk becoming agents of militarized socialization rather than sites of democratic education.

By Henry A. Giroux , 

Truthout

June 8, 2026

A pro-Palestine protester holds a placard that says, "No more research for IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces)" during a 2024 rally at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus in in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as student demonstrators demand divestment from Israeli military ties.Vincent Ricci / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images


Truthout is a vital news source and a living history of political struggle. If you think our work is valuable, support us with a donation of any size.

What happens to higher education when institutions dedicated to critical thought increasingly align themselves with the logics of war, surveillance, and national security? Unless we mount an organized resistance, we may viscerally experience the answer to this question all too soon.

We are already watching this transformation play out in both the U.S. and Canada as universities face growing pressure to align their missions, research agendas, and pedagogical practices with the values, priorities, and imperatives of a society increasingly organized around the logic of war.

Militarized policies, values, identities, and modes of governance no longer merely creep into U.S. society. Under the Trump administration, they increasingly define it. Militarization now extends far beyond the battlefield, reshaping everyday life, public institutions, and the very meaning of citizenship. War is celebrated as a moral imperative, often wrapped in the language of religious righteousness and white Christian nationalism. Due process gives way to abductions and arbitrary detention, dissent is met with threats and repression, soldiers occupy U.S. cities, and political violence is normalized through a steady stream of incendiary rhetoric and state-sponsored spectacles that glorify force, exclusion, and domination. Democratic ideals are displaced by a culture of fear, manufactured insecurity, and the belief that the nation is besieged by enemies both within and beyond its borders — largely immigrants and people of color.

In this militarized landscape, critical thought is derided, informed judgment is replaced by ideological conformity, and institutions charged with nurturing democratic agency increasingly come under attack. This fusion of militarism, toxic masculinity, religious fundamentalism, and white nationalist politics functions as a powerful form of public pedagogy, producing the authoritarian values, identities, and modes of agency that have historically provided the cultural foundations for fascist politics.
The Dangers of the “Military-Industrial-Academic Complex”

The late U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the dangers posed by what he called the “military-industrial-academic complex.” In an earlier draft of his famous 1961 farewell address on the military-industrial complex, Eisenhower included the word “academic,” recognizing that universities could become deeply entangled with military power, corporate interests, and state security agendas in ways that threatened their intellectual independence and democratic mission.


Critics Slam Carney’s Plan to Jump-Start Canada’s Economy via Military Industry
Canada’s prime minister faces blowback for his plan to hike Canadian arms companies’ profits by 240 percent in 10 years. By Nora Loreto , Truthout  March 3, 2026

This warning extends to countries that increasingly live in the shadow of the U.S.’s expanding warfare state and its militarized culture. For instance, against an increasingly militarized global order, the Canadian government has unveiled an expansive “Defence Industrial Strategy” backed by 81.8 billion Canadian dollars (around 60 billion in U.S. dollars) in new defense spending in Budget 2025, including 6.6 billion Canadian dollars devoted specifically to expanding the country’s defense-industrial infrastructure. The strategy marks the largest long-term expansion of Canada’s military economy since the Second World War.

What once appeared to be limited partnerships between North American universities and defense industries has evolved into a far broader transformation of higher education itself. As Canada dramatically expands military spending through its Defence Industrial Strategy, universities are increasingly being drawn into the orbit of defense priorities. Federal initiatives encourage partnerships between universities, defense contractors, and government agencies in fields such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, quantum computing, autonomous systems, and advanced surveillance technologies. Research funding is increasingly directed toward projects framed around national security, defense innovation, and military competitiveness. As these priorities gain influence, higher education is being reshaped by the social logics of militarization, technological control, and permanent security, altering not only what knowledge is produced but also the purposes to which it is put, raising urgent questions about the future of the university as a democratic public sphere.


Militarized knowledge production blurs the line between education and warfare, transforming universities into laboratories for the development of technologies whose ultimate purpose is often surveillance, social control, and lethal violence.

The growing use of drones and AI-driven warfare systems is not simply a military development. It signals a broader transformation in how research and knowledge are produced, funded, and valued. As universities deepen their involvement in military research, fields ranging from artificial intelligence and data analytics to robotics and cybersecurity are increasingly organized around the imperatives of surveillance, security, and warfare. AI technologies are already being deployed by state agencies to monitor migrants, journalists, activists, and political dissidents, while drones have revolutionized warfare by making it cheaper, more remote, and less accountable. Under such conditions, knowledge is not viewed primarily as a public good serving democratic life. Instead, it is increasingly organized around military imperatives of prediction, control, targeting, and domination. The result is a form of militarized knowledge production that blurs the line between education and warfare, transforming universities into laboratories for the development of technologies whose ultimate purpose is often surveillance, social control, and lethal violence.

Michael S. Sherry rightly argues that in an age in which state power is increasingly organized through militarized values and security logics, military culture now shapes not only state policy but “broad areas of national life.” As David Theo Goldberg argues, militarization no longer operates only through armies and weapons systems. It increasingly shapes culture, technology, modes of governance, and everyday life. As Goldberg observes:


The military is not just a fighting machine…. It serves and socializes. It hands down to society, as big brother might, its more or less perfected goods, from gunpowder to guns, computing to information management … In short, while militarily produced instruments might be retooled to other, broader social purposes, the military shapes pretty much the entire range of social production from commodities to culture, social goods to social theory.

The implications for higher education are profound. Militarization does not simply reshape culture, technology, and governance. It also reorganizes the production of knowledge itself, aligning university research with the imperatives of surveillance, security, and warfare while legitimating authoritarian forms of power. The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence research tied to military and surveillance applications deepens these dangers. Universities are increasingly helping to develop technologies used for predictive policing, automated warfare, mass surveillance, and forms of digital authoritarianism that blur the line between security and repression. Such developments are routinely justified in the language of innovation, efficiency, and national security, yet they raise profound ethical questions about the role of higher education in designing technologies that deepen inequality, expand state violence, erode civil liberties, and facilitate the killing of civilians, including children, in conflicts largely removed from public scrutiny.


The militarization of the university is not simply a matter of research contracts or funding priorities. It is pedagogical, cultural, and deeply political.

The militarization of the university is not simply a matter of research contracts or funding priorities. It is pedagogical, cultural, and deeply political. Universities do more than train workers; they shape civic identities, ethical sensibilities, and the capacity for democratic agency itself. When higher education embraces military partnerships and military-driven research agendas, it legitimates a worldview in which security eclipses justice, technological efficiency displaces ethical reflection, and dissent is recast as a threat rather than a democratic necessity.
How Militarization Reorganizes the Production of Knowledge

As militarization becomes woven into the fabric of political culture, universities increasingly reorganize knowledge, research priorities, and technological innovation around the assumptions of permanent conflict, geopolitical competition, and security management. In doing so, higher education normalizes the belief that militarized knowledge and military solutions should govern everyday life. Yet militarization does not merely reshape research priorities and institutional culture. It also reorganizes historical memory, civic identity, and the very terms through which democracy is understood.

Militarization also bears heavily on the production of knowledge itself. As Fintan O’Toole observes, contemporary authoritarian movements do more than expand military power; they seek to reshape historical memory and civic consciousness. Shameful histories are recast as heroic achievements, while assaults on democracy are reimagined as acts of patriotism. The Confederate rebellion is transformed from a defense of slavery into a noble cause, much as the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol is increasingly celebrated by its defenders as a patriotic uprising rather than an assault on democratic institutions. Equally troubling are efforts to remake the military itself through demands that soldiers be trained for loyalty to political leaders rather than to constitutional principles. Here, power seeks not only to command institutions but also to militarize knowledge, memory, and civic identity. Universities have a crucial responsibility to resist such distortions by defending historical truth, critical inquiry, and the capacity to distinguish education from propaganda.

As Kevin Baker notes, military solutions increasingly displace diplomacy, democratic institutions, and other civic responses to social problems. Within a culture saturated by militarism, aggression is celebrated as prevention, repression is justified in the name of security, and military force is invoked to discipline dissent and erode democratic values. Under such conditions, education is organized less around the imperatives of democratic culture than around the demands of the arms industry, surveillance systems, technological acceleration, and the national security state.

These developments become even more troubling when they intersect with the ongoing marketization of higher education. At its best, higher education functions as a democratic public sphere, a place where students learn to think critically, question authority, engage history, and imagine alternative democratic futures. Yet under the pressures of neoliberalism, universities have increasingly abandoned this mission. Education is now often reduced to job training, students are treated as consumers, faculty are deskilled and casualized, and learning is defined largely in instrumental terms. Questions about how education might nurture civic courage, ethical imagination, social responsibility, and democratic agency are increasingly sidelined in a market-driven university culture.

Yet the assault on higher education is not only economic. It is also ideological and political. In recent years, a growing chorus of liberal and conservative critics has claimed that universities have lost their way, charging that the humanities and critical scholarship have corrupted higher education through ideology and activism. Under the seductive language of “reform,” “balance,” “civility,” “institutional trust,” and “neutrality,” these critics present themselves as defenders of academic integrity while advancing a profoundly reactionary project. In some cases, liberal critics go so far as to treat “social justice” as a threat to scholarship rather than asking how power, exclusion, race, gender, class, empire, and inequality have always shaped what counts as knowledge. Their calls for neutrality, which function as a cover for depoliticization, do not protect intellectual freedom; they align with a broader assault on critical thought, historical memory, and democratic culture. They are aghast at the notion put forward by Thomas Chatterton Williams that “For humanities departments [and higher education in general] to continue to matter, they must challenge the modern world rather than accommodate it.” In doing so, they obscure the far more dangerous attacks on higher education coming from the right: censorship, book bans, assaults on DEI programs, the repression of student protest, and efforts to align universities with corporate, state, and military interests.

Critical scholarship is condemned as ideological, while militarized research, donor influence, state-directed threats of defunding, and forms of ideological indoctrination are celebrated as common sense. The real danger is not that universities have become too political, but that they are being stripped of their democratic mission and transformed into institutions that normalize conformity, surveillance, militarization, and authoritarian power. Higher education is not under attack because it has been ruined by the left. On the contrary, it is under assault by the Trump administration and a broader network of far right forces precisely because it keeps alive a dangerous truth: education is not merely about credentials, careers, or conformity to the status quo. At its best, it cultivates the capacity for critical judgment, informed dissent, compassion, and democratic agency. What authoritarian movements fear most is not ideological indoctrination but an educated public capable of questioning power, holding authority accountable, and imagining a more just future.

Militarization deepens anti-democratic tendencies. Research is increasingly tied to military applications, geopolitical competition, and outside funding rather than to the public good. Universities adopt the language of security, risk management, efficiency, and competitiveness while corporate and military values increasingly shape institutional priorities. As a Simons Foundation policy briefing warns, militarization has increasingly become a “default response” to political instability and global insecurity, reinforcing a culture in which social problems are framed through the logics of surveillance, strategic competition, and military preparedness rather than diplomacy, public investment, and democratic cooperation. As Professor Catherine Lutz notes, such actions run the risk of eroding legal and moral boundaries. In such a climate, higher education loses its civic character and becomes subordinated to the interests of the warfare state and defense industries.

As universities become increasingly tied to military and security logics, they risk abandoning their civic purpose in favor of a pedagogy of permanent emergency, one that privileges surveillance, strategic competition, and technological domination over critical inquiry, civic imagination, ethical responsibility, and social solidarity. What disappears in this militarized vision of higher education is the conviction that universities should cultivate informed citizens capable of holding power accountable rather than simply servicing the imperatives of the national security state.

Equally troubling, militarization reshapes the culture of the university itself. Militarized institutions reward conformity, secrecy, technocratic thinking, and instrumental rationality. Ethical questions about violence, disposability, colonialism, and state power are pushed aside in favor of managerial efficiency and national competitiveness. Students protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, settler colonialism, genocide, sexual violence, or war crimes are too often met not with dialogue but with surveillance, administrative repression, and policing.


The dominance of war-like values in both higher education and the wider civic culture prepares “civil society itself for the production of violence.”

In such instances, the university ceases to function as a space for critical engagement and becomes instead an extension of a broader authoritarian culture. As scholar John Gills notes, the dominance of war-like values in both higher education and the wider civic culture prepares “civil society itself for the production of violence.” In this way, universities risk becoming agents of militarized socialization rather than sites of democratic education. Such developments raise not only political and educational concerns but also urgent ethical questions about the kinds of institutions that universities are becoming and the values they choose to endorse.

The militarization of higher education raises a profound ethical question: What happens when universities enter into partnerships with military institutions while remaining silent about documented human rights abuses associated with those same institutions? Such silence is never politically neutral. It suggests that violations of human rights can be overlooked, rationalized, or normalized when carried out in the name of security, defense, or national interest.

This issue extends beyond universities themselves and raises broader questions about the responsibilities of democratic governments. As Canada, among other countries, deepens military cooperation with allies and expands investments in defense industries, it cannot exempt those relationships from ethical scrutiny. If credible allegations of war crimes, torture, collective punishment, or sexual violence are ignored in the name of strategic alliances or national security, democratic principles are hollowed out from within. Universities, precisely because they are charged with fostering critical inquiry and ethical judgment, have a responsibility to challenge such silences rather than reproduce them.

These ethical concerns become especially urgent when universities maintain relationships with institutions implicated in serious human rights abuses. The issue is particularly troubling in light of allegations regarding the use of sexual violence against Palestinians. Writing in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof noted that while there is no evidence that Israeli leaders explicitly order rape, United Nations investigators have reported that sexual violence has become one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures” in the mistreatment of Palestinians. Other human rights organizations have reached similarly disturbing conclusions.

Such allegations also raise broader concerns about how security regimes can be used not only against occupied populations but also against those who challenge state policies. Reuters reported that organizers of a flotilla attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza alleged that some activists detained by Israeli authorities experienced physical abuse and that at least 15 reported sexual assaults, including allegations of rape. Zeteo provided shocking and wrenching video testimonies from some of the activists, largely ignored by Western media. Whatever the final findings regarding these allegations, they underscore the need for independent scrutiny of security institutions and the dangers of granting them unquestioned legitimacy in the name of national defense. When accusations of abuse are met with silence rather than investigation, the boundaries between security, impunity, and state-sanctioned violence become increasingly blurred.

If universities claim to uphold principles of human rights, social responsibility, and ethical inquiry, they cannot selectively ignore such evidence when it implicates states or institutions with which they maintain research, military, or security partnerships. To do so risks transforming universities from spaces of critical inquiry into institutions that legitimate power while remaining silent about its abuses. At stake is more than the question of particular research contracts. It is the moral integrity of higher education itself.

These concerns are not confined to particular institutions or isolated abuses. They are symptomatic of a broader culture in which militarized values increasingly shape public life, political discourse, and social priorities. From sporting events and military recruitment in schools to popular films, social media spectacles, gun culture, and state-sponsored propaganda, aggression, domination, and war are normalized as features of everyday life.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the influence of Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who celebrates “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” and wraps militarism in the language of white Christian nationalism and religious righteousness. As Jasper Craven observes, Hegseth champions a form of “military manliness” stripped of any ethical center. Such a worldview elevates domination as a virtue, defines violence as a moral ideal, and transforms, in Craven’s words, “the Pentagon into the staging ground for an ideological religious crusade.” As these values circulate through culture and public institutions, they increasingly shape higher education itself, influencing not only what universities teach but also the forms of knowledge they produce, fund, and legitimate.


Universities cannot claim to defend democracy while simultaneously aligning themselves with industries and state policies organized for state violence, war, and imperial aggression.

At the same time, vast intellectual, scientific, and financial resources are being diverted from urgent public needs such as climate justice, public health, democratic education, and social welfare toward the expansion of military technologies and security infrastructures. In the process, the arms industry reaps enormous profits while universities increasingly risk becoming laboratories for aggression rather than institutions dedicated to civic responsibility, ethical imagination, and the common good.

Defenders of militarized partnerships insist that universities must remain pragmatic and “neutral” in securing funding and advancing national interests. But neutrality in such cases is largely a myth. Universities cannot claim to defend democracy while simultaneously aligning themselves with industries and state policies organized for state violence, war, and imperial aggression. Higher education has no legitimate ethical mandate to function as a research arm of militarized power.
Universities Must Refuse to Become Laboratories for War

The issue is not whether universities are political, but what kind of politics they embody and in whose interests they function. In an age marked by rising authoritarianism, widening inequality, climate catastrophe, and endless wars, universities cannot escape matters of power and values, and they must decide whether they will serve democracy or militarized power. Nor can educators retreat into the call for neutrality. At stake here is more than institutional policy. It is the fate of the university as a democratic institution. Few writers understood these dangers more clearly than Toni Morrison, who warned: “If the university does not take seriously and rigorously its role as a guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some other regime or menage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of us, and without us.”

Higher education may be one of the few public spheres left where knowledge, values, and learning can nurture radical hope, civic responsibility, informed agency, critical thinking, and substantive democracy. The struggle against the militarization of Canadian universities is therefore not merely a fight over funding priorities. It is a struggle over whether education will serve democracy or become an extension of the warfare state. Activists from groups like World Beyond War Canada and the Canadian Federation of Students are right to insist that genuine security comes not from militarism and permanent war, but from investing in education, housing, public health, and the social good.

Universities must refuse their transformation into laboratories for war, surveillance, and technological domination. At stake is whether higher education will further accommodate militarized and authoritarian power or become a crucial site of resistance, critical consciousness, and democratic possibility, one that refuses to confuse security with fear, civic responsibility with obedience, and education with the demands of war and domination. In an age when militarism increasingly shapes culture, politics, and everyday life, universities must remain among the few institutions willing to defend critical inquiry, civic responsibility, and democratic freedom against the expanding reach of the warfare state.



This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Henry A. Giroux

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

French start-up Quobly raises €115m to build cheaper quantum computers

French start-up Quobly secured €115 million in funding this week as it pursues an ambitious goal: building quantum computers using the same manufacturing techniques as ordinary computer chips.


Issued on: 04/06/2026 - RFI

Quobly, the Grenoble-based quantum computing start-up co-founded by Maud Vinet, is developing silicon-based chips as France seeks to strengthen its home-grown advanced computing industry. © Thomas Richardson

The funding round, announced on Wednesday, was led by state-backed investment bank Bpifrance, chipmaker STMicroelectronics and Sealsq.

Quobly said the money would help it develop quantum processors based on modified transistors – the tiny switches that underpin conventional computers.

The Grenoble-based company is betting that using existing semiconductor manufacturing techniques could make quantum computers cheaper and easier to produce than rival technologies.

“We benefit from the economy of scale of this industry,” said Maud Vinet, Quobly’s chief executive and co-founder. “The cost of producing our chip leads us to design quantum computers that will be 100 times cheaper than competing technologies.”

French firm part of global quest to build quantum computers

Big promises

Quantum computing has attracted growing investment in Europe and the United States, despite the technology still being at an early stage.

Researchers believe quantum computers could eventually solve problems in chemistry, biotechnology, materials science and cybersecurity that would take conventional computers far longer to process.

But today's quantum machines remain less stable and less reliable than conventional computers, whose semiconductor foundations have benefited from more than 50 years of development.

Quobly's approach is designed to take advantage of the scale and precision of an industry that already manufactures billions of chips every year, rather than relying on more experimental production methods.

French ambitions

The investment comes as France increases spending on advanced computing technologies. President Emmanuel Macron said last month that France would invest €1 billion in quantum technologies, a day after the administration of US President Donald Trump announced $2 billion in funding for the sector.

For France, the race is about more than scientific prestige. Macron has made technological sovereignty a key part of his economic agenda, arguing that Europe must be able to build, run and protect the digital systems on which its industries, governments and citizens increasingly depend.

France has been trying to strengthen the entire computing chain – from chips and data centres to cloud services, artificial intelligence and quantum systems. Paris has also promoted itself as a centre for AI innovation, including at the Paris AI Action Summit.

Macron has pointed to France's nuclear-heavy electricity mix as another advantage. Data centres and advanced computing systems require large amounts of power, and France believes its relatively abundant low-carbon electricity can help attract investment in the sector.

Industrial scale

Quobly is working closely with STMicroelectronics, one of Europe's leading chipmakers, to manufacture its quantum chips. Around 15 Quobly employees are already working inside the company's facilities.

Vinet said the partnership is essential because quantum computing requires the consistent production quality of a major commercial fabrication plant.

"It requires the yield and the quality of fabrication of commercial fabs," she said. "We needed an agreement with this commercial fab to exchange the learning of what it is that is needed to optimise the technology."

The investment also comes as Europe steps up efforts to reduce its dependence on foreign technology providers. Brussels is preparing new cloud and AI rules that could make it harder for US technology companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google to win sensitive public-sector contracts if they are judged too exposed to foreign government control.

While practical uses for quantum computing remain limited for now, governments increasingly see the technology as strategically important because of its potential impact on cybersecurity, defence, pharmaceuticals and industrial research.

As a French start-up, Quobly is betting that techniques already familiar to the semiconductor industry can help bring quantum computing closer to large-scale commercial use.

(with newswires)

Ukraine launches fresh drone attack on St. Petersburg region on final day of ‘Russian Davos’

Ukraine on Saturday fired hundreds of drones targeting the St. Petersburg region in the second such attack on Russia’s second-largest city in less than a week. The attack came on the final day of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, President Vladimir Putin’s annual investment forum known as “Russia’s Davos”.

Issued on: 06/06/2026 - 
By: FRANCE 24

Satellite image provided by Vantor shows fire crews working to control the fires onboard the Russian guided-missile corvette Boikiy at the Kronstadt naval base west of St. Petersburg, Russia, June 3, 2026. Vantor via AP

Residents of St. Petersburg were told not to leave their homes after a large-scale Ukrainian drone attack targeted Russia’s second-largest city Saturday morning, underscoring Kyiv’s growing ability to hit deep inside Russia.

The attack came a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin refused an offer to meet his Ukrainian counterpart.

St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov advised the residents not to go outside and warned of possible disruptions to mobile internet service, while regional Governor Alexander Drozdenko said 141 drones were shot down over the surrounding Leningrad region.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said its air defences shot down 376 Ukrainian drones.

“Last night, our drones covered a distance of about 1,000 kilometres to the St. Petersburg region – to the enemy navy’s arsenals and a base in Kronstadt,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on X.

Although no casualties were immediately reported, the renewed attack on St. Petersburg is the latest embarrassing blow to Putin’s efforts to cast the conflict as a distant event that doesn’t affect Russian daily life.

Cars are seen parked near banners with branding for the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) at the forum's venue as black smoke rises in distance in Saint Petersburg on June 3, 2026, where Ukrainian drones hit energy and military sites. © AFP
02:03

A Ukrainian drone strike set ablaze an oil terminal in the city and hit a nearby naval base Wednesday, hours before the opening of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Putin’s annual showcase for investment.

Speaking at the forum, Putin said Thursday that Russia will strengthen its air defences to counter recent Ukrainian drone attacks, which have reached deep inside his country and cast a cloud over the event in his hometown of St. Petersburg.

Putin on Friday rejected a proposal by Zelensky for a face-to-face meeting on the four-year-old conflict, saying he sees “no point” in it. Thursday’s letter, the first public message Zelensky has written directly to Putin since Russia sent troops into Ukraine in 2022, was a sweeping critique of the Russian leader’s 26 years in power, as well as some taunts about his age.

Responding to Putin's dismissal of the proposed meeting, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Saturday that things would “only get worse for Russia.”

"Failures will get more humiliating," he wrote on X, warning that there are “no safe places in Russia that can be exempt” from Ukrainian long-range attacks, and that the intensity of attacks “will continue to grow.”

With the front line barely moving as swarms of drones hinder advances, both sides have sought an edge by launching long-range strikes.

In Ukraine, one person was killed and three wounded overnight into Saturday in the Dnipropetrovsk region, as Russian forces struck three districts nearly 30 times with drones and artillery, regional head Oleksandr Hanzha said.

In Zaporizhzhia, seven people sought medical care after a Russian drone strike started a fire at a parking lot, according to regional head Ivan Fedorov.

Russia targeted Ukraine overnight with 272 strike drones, and air defences shot down 249 of them, the Ukrainian air force said Saturday.

(FRANCE 24 with AP)

Ukraine banks on its defence industry to drive economic growth

06.06.2026, DPA

Photo: Sven Hoppe/dpa

Ukraine regards its defence industry as a lasting source of economic strength, Finance Minister Serhii Marchenko said on Saturday.

“The demand we have created in Ukraine has given rise to an economic sector that is now practically booming. It is therefore a very important part of our future,” Marchenko said at the annual meeting of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in Riga. 

The key now is to strengthen the industry, provide it with development capacity and open up its military potential to a broader market, he explained. To this end, Ukraine is facing the decision to allow the export of military goods.

According to Marchenko, expanding and utilizing this potential could lead to more than just further progress in military equipment and weapons. 

“I believe these developments can help create a natural civilian environment after the war. Because some of the production we currently use for military purposes can also be used for civilian purposes,” the Ukrainian official added.

With Western assistance, Ukraine is defending itself against a Russian invasion – and, in the fifth year of its defensive struggle, is regarded as a world leader in drone warfare. 

At the same time, the government in Kiev hopes to receive the first tranche of funds from a €90 billion ($105.5 billion) European Union loan as early as June, which is also to be used for defence purposes. Given the ongoing war, it is quite problematic and difficult to attract private investors, said Marchenko.

(c) 2026 dpa Deutsche Presse Agentur GmbH

CU

Column: AI may not be the demand booster copper bulls expect

Reuters | June 4, 2026 |

Stock image.

(The opinions expressed here are those of Andy Home, a columnist for Reuters.)

From the Bronze Age to the AI age, copper is again at the heart of the latest big investment craze.

The rationale is simple. Data centers need a lot of wiring, cooling and power, which means they need a lot of copper. AI data centers need even more.

A crypto data center ​requires 21 metric tons of copper per megawatt installed, while an AI training data center in China has a copper intensity of 47 tons, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

The ‌escalating global AI arms race will undoubtedly boost demand for copper. But by how much?

S&P Global forecasts usage in data centers and associated infrastructure will rise from 1.1 million tons in 2025 to 2.5 million tons in 2040.

There are, though, a lot of “buts” lurking in that forecast.

Demand could be as high as 2.7 million tons or as low as 1.7 million, depending on the interaction of multiple fast-changing variables.

As the authors of “Copper in the Age of AI” put it, the “wide span underscores both ​the uncertainty and the scale of the challenge ahead.”

The delivery gap

One key variable in assessing likely copper demand is the scale of AI data center expansion.

Many of the new megawatts of announced AI ​computing capacity are “bragawatts”, according to a study released by the Oxford Smith School and financial broker Marex Group.

While media and markets are expecting and pricing a rapid ⁠exponential ramp-up in AI infrastructure, the outcome is likely to be “a roll-out that is delayed, lumpy, and constrained by physical realities.”

The biggest hurdle is grid connectivity. A data center can be built in 18 to 24 months but the ​average US waiting time for a grid connection was four years between 2018 and 2023.

That assumes there is enough power in the first plac

Ireland built so many data centers that by 2021 the sector’s share of ​national energy consumption had risen to over 20%, threatening to overwhelm the country’s energy system.

The Irish grid operator imposed a de facto four-year moratorium on new applications, which has only just been lifted, albeit with strict new conditions.

Throw into the mix long lead times for essential equipment such as transformers and a shortage of specialized labour and there is a growing gap between announced and delivered AI computing capacity, according to the Smith study.

Copper, it warns, is in danger of falling down that gap.

More power, less copper

Quantifying how much copper is used in data centers is also a fast-moving target.

The battle for AI supremacy is one of computing power, and as chips evolve, so must the architecture of rack ​design and wiring.

S&P Global notes there is already a shift underway from copper to fiber optics in the interconnect cabling between processor racks.

This could result in copper intensity in data centers falling by 4 or 5 tons per megawatt installed, ‌not a ⁠trivial change given the overall 30- to 40-ton range deployed in non-crypto data centers.

More fundamentally, though, chip company Nvidia argues that even copper will be challenged to deliver the low latency and high bandwidth of next-generation AI centers.

Using traditional low voltages would necessitate “an unsustainable volume of copper cabling.”

Nvidia is proposing a transition to 800 volts, which means the same wire gauge can carry 157% more power. A simpler set-up also means fewer copper conductors and smaller connectors.

Reducing copper usage is both a cost consideration and, the company argues, a critical pathway to ever-increasing rack power.

Material wars

Ardent copper bulls argue that such is the looming deficit in copper that the metal could itself become a ​bottleneck in the roll-out of AI capacity.

That may be ​more true of some of the other metals ⁠that go into connecting physical and virtual worlds.

Data centers are a sink for all sorts of minerals, 60 to 70 tons of them per megawatt installed, according to the World Economic Forum.

There’s copper, but also aluminum, cobalt, nickel, tin, gold, silver, germanium and gallium and, of course, a smattering of the increasingly ubiquitous rare earth ​metals.

Germanium and gallium are more likely to pose a materials bottleneck than copper. Western supply of both metals is acutely tight after China imposed export restrictions ​in 2023.

Big Tech is competing ⁠for limited supply with both the US Pentagon and the European Union, which is looking to build a strategic metals stockpile. It’s by no means certain it will win.

Pricing complexity

All new industries are liable to the same disconnect between promise and delivery, but power availability, grid connectivity and critical metals supply are structural real-world inhibitors of the AI revolution.

And while no-one’s going to stop using copper in data center design, its intensity of use is beholden to the race ⁠for ever more ​computing power, which in turn requires constant evolutions in AI architecture.

There are multiple moving parts to copper’s new data center demand ​vector. The market, which has seized on AI as the next big thing, may not be pricing that complexity.

(Editing by Marguerita Choy)

 

Abu Dhabi’s IRH turns down Zambian copper concentrate waiver

Bloomberg News | June 4, 2026 | 

Mopani area J open pit. (Image by Mopani Copper Mines).

The Zambian unit of Abu Dhabi’s International Resources Holding doesn’t plan to export copper concentrate, after again being granted the largest quota in a government waiver to ship the semi-processed form of the metal.

Mopani Copper Mines said it hasn’t changed its position since July when the first exemptions were announced. At that time, the company said it had “no plan to export any part” of the allocation and intended to feed that output into its own “processing operations in line with our long-term strategy of strengthening domestic refining capacity.”

Zambia’s government on June 2 suspended a 10% export duty on almost 272,000 tons of copper concentrate that can be shipped via the state-owned Industrial Resources Ltd. during the next three months. IRL has a metals-trading partnership with Mercuria Energy Group.

Mopani’s share is 100,000 tons, while the three biggest mines in Zambia — owned by Barrick Mining Corp. and First Quantum Minerals Ltd. — are entitled to export a similar volume combined. Mopani was also awarded allocations of the same size 11 months ago and in March.

IRH, which is part of a vast conglomerate controlled by United Arab Emirates National Security Adviser Sheikh Tahnoon Bin Zayed Ali Nahyan, acquired 51% of the Zambian copper mining complex, in early 2024.

The export duty is normally in place to encourage miners to process all their concentrate at Zambia’s four operational copper smelters, one of which belongs to Mopani. The exemptions are introduced when that smelting capacity is constrained.

Konkola Copper Mines said on May 29 that its smelter had begun a planned 60-day shutdown to undertake maintenance and repairs.

Mopani’s “priority is to smelt all available concentrate,” the company’s public relations department previously said.

(By William Clowes)

 

KAIST study provides first large-scale empirical analysis of dual-use research and security oversight​

The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

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A new analysis of approximately 600,000 research papers reveals structural limits to single-country security oversight of dual-use research and identifies trade-offs that policymakers face when strengthening such oversight.

KAIST (President Kwang Hyung Lee) announced today that Professor Seokbeom Kwon of the School of Business and Technology Management has published a large-scale empirical analysis examining the structural limitations of tightening security oversight on dual-use research and its potential cost to scientific progress. The study appears in Science on June 5, 2026.

Dual-use research (DUR) refers to scientific research that has both legitimate civilian applications—such as vaccine and treatment development—and potential security-sensitive applications, such as biological weapons or bioterrorism. Examples include research on viral transmission mechanisms or pathogen behavior.

The United States has been strengthening security oversight of dual-use research. Most recently, Executive Order 14292, signed in May 2025, intensified federal oversight of biological research with potential security implications, including dangerous gain-of-function research. The U.S. government also has extended the policy definition of the dual-use research to include broader categories in addition to the gain-of-function research. However, existing policy dialogues have relied primarily on anecdotal evidence and historical case studies.

U.S. ex-ante security oversight institutions are based on National Security Decision Directive 189 (NSDD-189) and apply when the federal government is involved in research. Therefore, research conducted without federal government involvement effectively falls outside the jurisdiction of this oversight.

Professor Seokbeom Kwon developed a new analytical methodology combining the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s multi-stage security review process with patent-paper citation data, and analyzed approximately 600,000 research papers. The work has been recognized in academia for shifting discussions of dual-use research, which had previously relied largely on case-based analysis, toward large-scale empirical analysis.

The analysis showed that dual-use research consistently has greater scientific impact than comparable research. This means that research subject to the security oversight tends to play an important role in scientific progress and technological innovation.

In addition, the share of dual-use research directly involving the U.S. federal government decreased from about 41% in 1981 to about 22% in 2005, while the share involving foreign institutions increased from 35% to 54% over the same period. This shows that while U.S. security oversight mechanisms based on NSDD-189 have been applied to domestic research, the share of overseas dual-use research has continued to expand.

Professor Seokbeom Kwon explained, “Strengthening security oversight on dual-use research by a single country alone may impose disproportionate costs on domestic science, while having structural limits in preventing the development of equally important research conducted overseas,” adding, “To achieve both scientific progress and national security, international cooperation and balanced policy design could contribute to mitigating these structural tensions.”

This study provides data-based evidence for international policy discussions surrounding dual-use research. In particular, it is expected to serve as an important reference for future discussions on research security regulation and global cooperation systems not only in biotechnology, but also in advanced technology fields that may be connected to security concerns, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum technology.

This study was published as a sole-author paper by Professor Seokbeom Kwon in Science on June 5, 2026.
 ※ Paper title: “Dual-use research under scrutiny,” DOI: 10.1126/science.aee2479

This research was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea’s Humanities and Social Sciences Young Researcher Support Program (2025S1A5A8009362).

 

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DOI

10.1126/science.aee2479 

Method of Research

Meta-analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Dual-use research under scrutiny

Article Publication Date

5-Jun-2026