CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Prisons aren’t a new problem. Ian Acheson wrote about the decay of the high-sec estate for us last month; David Gauke painted a bleak portrait of the current spending settlement in December. A year ago, I examined the abject failure of the Government’s promise to have delivered 10,000 new jail places by 2020 (actual number delivered at that point: 206)."

"The government of Niger has asked the U.S. military to leave — even though there’s a critical drone base there that’s keeping terrorism in check. On this week’s edition of “The Hunt with WTOP national security correspondent JJ Green,” Dr. Hans-Jakob Schindler, senior director at the Counter Extremism Project, breaks down the consequences."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Is there such a thing as an acceptable level of terrorism? You would be forgiven for thinking so. Last week, the results of yet another inquest into a terrorist attack here, all but flattened by the news cycle juggernaut, revealed yet more failures by the state’s agencies to protect citizens."

CEP Senior Director Dr. Hans-Jakob Schindler interviewed: "We are close undoubtedly, but I'd like to add that a word of caution that we've been close before. It has frequently really been a problem that the leadership in Gaza of Hamas was not willing to accept the conditions of a deal that the Hamas leadership outside Gaza, for example in Qatar, was willing to accept." 

"The Counter Extremism Project (CEP) recently made a submission to the government's right-wing extremism inquiry in which it said extremists were increasingly turning towards under-regulated mainstream social media platforms."

"Voice of America also cited a report by the Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit that moinitors global terrorist activity, that concluded 'March was, by every metric, the most violent month of ISIS’s Badia [central Syrian desert] insurgency since late 2017, when the group first lost control of its territory.'"

"Exit programs would generally work well in Germany, says Sofia Koller from the Counter Extremism Project (CEP). She has been researching how to deal with IS returnees for years. She warns that exit processes do not work linearly. Time and again, life crises could drive former extremists to radical ideology."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson wrote: "Tommy Robinson, a self-invented English ‘patriot’, was free to attend yesterday’s St George’s Day event in central London which descended into ugly clashes between participants and police. Earlier in the day, he had been released from court after successfully arguing that a police dispersal order that resulted in his arrest and charge in November last year was unlawfully applied to him due to a paperwork blunder. He says he will now sue the Metropolitan police.

Robinson has nearly half a million followers on social media. They have, by now, fully absorbed the narrative that when it comes to protest, Britain has a two-tier system of policing."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Why did Gideon Falter cross the road? Or try to? That is a question that went viral this weekend. A video emerged of Falter, who leads the Campaign Against Antisemitism, being threatened by police for trying to cross a pro-Palestinian protest in central London. He was wearing a kippah and carrying a prayer shawl bag, and had reportedly just emerged from a synagogue with some friends and was trying to get home. Police officers had spotted him leaving the pavement on a collision course with protestors and intervened. A tense standoff unfolded, with an officer telling him in that his ‘openly Jewish’ appearance was ‘antagonising’ the crowd. A calamitous initial response by the Metropolitan Police which, in effect, said that being recognisably Jewish was ‘provocative’ compounded calls for the force’s beleaguered boss Sir Mark Rowley to resign."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Aldous Huxley’s dystopian best seller Brave New World, published back in 1934, envisaged a society where stability was enforced by a numbing drug called ‘soma’. Constant consumption of soma, mandated by the state, dulled the senses, vanished despair and discouraged rebellion. I was reminded of this by comments made by some of the Times‘ new crime commissioners as they launch a year-long project to fix our broken criminal justice system. They were speculating as to why we weren’t seeing a national jail insurrection similar to what happened here in the spring of 1990 when multiple prisons across the country exploded in violent disorder. After all, many of the precursors that existed then are now present once again: severe overcrowding, demoralised and overwhelmed staff, endemic brutality and squalor.”