Welcome to our newsletter, Digital Transatlantic Dialogue. If you haven't joined us yet, we offer regular content about global headlines, upcoming events with experts from our inspiring community, and more!

Today's Newsletter
  1. Updates to Our Digital Platform
  2. Interview With Newton Campbell, Young Leader '20
  3. Headlines
  4. World Humanitarian Day (WHD) 
Updates to Our Digital Platform
We created the French-American Foundation webinar series to engage our wider community in consistent transatlantic dialogue during the COVID-19 crisis. Beginning in March, the initiative has since grown to over 20 webinars with 40 different speakers on topics from public policy and leadership to literature and the arts.

This summer, we’re designing a new program strategy with a robust set of webinars for the months to come. Highlighting the Foundation’s key areas of focus in recent years, each virtual event will fall into one of the following categories.
  • Young Leaders
  • Transatlantic Forum
  • Cyber Security
  • Public Policy
  • Business
  • The Arts
We’re equally pleased to continue offering weekly newsletters, publishing new interviews, and working with our program participants, constituents, and readers to adapt to the ongoing challenges of the COVID-19 crisis.

Stay tuned for details on the start of our program calendar, beginning early September!

Interview With Newton Campbell, Young Leader '20
Dr. Newton Campbell is a Computer Scientist specializing in artificial intelligence. Through SAIC, he currently serves as an Artificial Intelligence subject matter expert on the NASA Langley Research Center OCIO Data Science Team.

Q. Before NASA, you worked in support of the Department of Defense and the Intelligence community for ten years, particularly in the realm of cyber security. With the 2020 elections around the corner, there’s sure to be an increased focus on cyber security challenges. Do you have any key takeaways from your time in the cyber security world as to how our society can best handle cyber threats in an election year?

"As we often saw during my time in the DoD and IC, human users can often be the biggest cyber security vulnerability. A lot of work has gone into making things like electronic voting systems secure. And you will continue to see asymptotic improvements to those kinds of systems during and after this election. But the biggest vulnerability is the voting populace.

In particular, we are still trying to figure out social media’s role in our democratic discourse. And while we are trying to figure that out, that discourse is continuously being assaulted by external actors (i.e. Russia, Iran, China). Their efforts have only seemed to increase since the known incidences of 2016. We have already seen their attempts to stoke the fires of our national discourse this year, when it came to our discussions on COVID-19 and civil rights. So there is no reason to doubt that they will continue to lob nation-state backed social engineering attacks to continue to divide the populace. An old colleague used to say to me that, in war, advantage is created through strategy and technology. But it’s won by soldiers. If you take away enough of the enemy’s soldiers, or turn enough of them, you won’t even need to send your own.(...)"

Headlines
  • "Thousands are under evacuation orders in California as more than two dozen large wildfires burn in the central part of the state, with the most serious and urgent situation unfolding in the city of Vacaville, about 35 miles north of Sacramento. The city of 100,000 is under partial evacuation orders because of the advancing flames. (...)"


  • "Some hopeful signs were beginning to emerge as the U.S. logged the lowest daily number of new coronavirus cases in nearly eight weeks and hospitalizations showed sustained declines. (...)"

  • "Les violences commises contre des travailleurs humanitaires n’ont jamais été aussi élevées que l’an dernier, a annoncé l’ONU, mercredi 19 août, à l’occasion de la Journée mondiale de l’aide humanitaire. (...)"
 World Humanitarian Day (WHD) 
"On World Humanitarian Day (WHD) August 19, the world commemorates humanitarian workers killed and injured in the course of their work, and we honour all aid and health workers who continue, despite the odds, to provide life-saving support and protection to people most in need.

This year World Humanitarian Day comes as the world continues to fight the COVID-19 pandemic over recent months. Aid workers are overcoming unprecedented access hurdles to assist people in humanitarian crises in 54 countries, as well as in a further nine countries which have been catapulted into humanitarian need by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This day was designated in memory of the 19 August 2003 bomb attack on the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, Iraq, killing 22 people, including the chief humanitarian in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello. In 2009, the United Nations General Assembly formalized the day as World Humanitarian Day. (...)" Read more.

"These real-life heroes are doing extraordinary things in extraordinary times to help women, men and children whose lives are upended by crises." -- António Guterres
Covid-19 Sources
Breaking News
Statistics
Visit our website