Global terrorism index 2015: measuring and understanding the impact of terrorism

This is the third edition of the Global Terrorism Index, which provides a comprehensive summary of the key global trends and patterns in terrorism over the last 15 years with a special emphasis on 2014. This report provides a detailed analysis of the changing trends in terrorism since 2000, for 162 countries. It investigates the changing patterns of terrorism by geographic activity, methods of attack, organisations involved and the national economic and political context. The GTI has also been compared to a range of socio- economic indicators to determine the key underlying factors that have the closest statistical relationship to terrorism. In 2014 the total number of deaths from terrorism increased by 80 per cent when compared to the prior year. This is the largest yearly increase in the last 15 years. Since the beginning of the 21st century, there has been over a nine-fold increase in the number of deaths from terrorism, rising from 3,329 in 2000 to 32,658 in 2014. Terrorism remains highly concentrated with most of the activity occurring in just five countries — Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. These countries accounted for 78 per cent of the lives lost in 2014. Although highly concentrated, terrorism is spreading to more countries, with the number of countries experiencing more than 500 deaths increasing from five to 11, a 120 per cent increase from the previous year. The six new countries with over 500 deaths are Somalia, Ukraine, Yemen, Central African Republic, South Sudan and Cameroon

Transnational networking on the far right: The case of Britain and Germany

This article examines an aspect of transnational activity that is often neglected, namely the transnational activism of the far right. It uses a case study of the British National Party (BNP) and the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD – German National Democratic Party) in order to explore how its leaders and activists share ideas and information, policy and praxis, and how this is employed in the development of a strategic ‘master frame’ that they believe will allow them to overcome the limits of purely national activity in a globalised world. It explores the evolution of the links between the two parties, their nature and indeed the limits of such transnational activism upon national ‘frames’ in order to present a historical overview of the diffusion of ideology and strategy within the contemporary European far right

A global metagenomic map of urban microbiomes and antimicrobial resistance

We present a global atlas of 4,728 metagenomic samples from mass-transit systems in 60 cities over 3 years, representing the first systematic, worldwide catalog of the urban microbial ecosystem. This atlas provides an annotated, geospatial profile of microbial strains, functional characteristics, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) markers, and genetic elements, including 10,928 viruses, 1,302 bacteria, 2 archaea, and 838,532 CRISPR arrays not found in reference databases. We identified 4,246 known species of urban microorganisms and a consistent set of 31 species found in 97% of samples that were distinct from human commensal organisms. Profiles of AMR genes varied widely in type and density across cities. Cities showed distinct microbial taxonomic signatures that were driven by climate and geographic differences. These results constitute a high-resolution global metagenomic atlas that enables discovery of organisms and genes, highlights potential public health and forensic applications, and provides a culture-independent view of AMR burden in cities.Funding: the Tri-I Program in Computational Biology and Medicine (CBM) funded by NIH grant 1T32GM083937; GitHub; Philip Blood and the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), supported by NSF grant number ACI-1548562 and NSF award number ACI-1445606; NASA (NNX14AH50G, NNX17AB26G), the NIH (R01AI151059, R25EB020393, R21AI129851, R35GM138152, U01DA053941); STARR Foundation (I13- 0052); LLS (MCL7001-18, LLS 9238-16, LLS-MCL7001-18); the NSF (1840275); the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (OPP1151054); the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (G-2015-13964); Swiss National Science Foundation grant number 407540_167331; NIH award number UL1TR000457; the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute under contract number DE-AC02-05CH11231; the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy; Stockholm Health Authority grant SLL 20160933; the Institut Pasteur Korea; an NRF Korea grant (NRF-2014K1A4A7A01074645, 2017M3A9G6068246); the CONICYT Fondecyt Iniciación grants 11140666 and 11160905; Keio University Funds for Individual Research; funds from the Yamagata prefectural government and the city of Tsuruoka; JSPS KAKENHI grant number 20K10436; the bilateral AT-UA collaboration fund (WTZ:UA 02/2019; Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, UA:M/84-2019, M/126-2020); Kyiv Academic Univeristy; Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine project numbers 0118U100290 and 0120U101734; Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa 2013–2017; the CERCA Programme / Generalitat de Catalunya; the CRG-Novartis-Africa mobility program 2016; research funds from National Cheng Kung University and the Ministry of Science and Technology; Taiwan (MOST grant number 106-2321-B-006-016); we thank all the volunteers who made sampling NYC possible, Minciencias (project no. 639677758300), CNPq (EDN - 309973/2015-5), the Open Research Fund of Key Laboratory of Advanced Theory and Application in Statistics and Data Science – MOE, ECNU, the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong through project 11215017, National Key RD Project of China (2018YFE0201603), and Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Major Project (2017SHZDZX01) (L.S.