Aloha Alumni 'Ohana and Treasured Guests,

This is Daniel, your friendly neighborhood Portal Manager.  As we overcome the euphoria of letting go of 2020 and nest firmly in the 2021, I want to reach out with warm greetings to everyone.  APCSSLink and the GlobalNET platform experienced a great many changes in the last year, and those changes are not done.  In my highlighting those changes I would like to assure my audience that these addons and revisions are designed to provide you all with a better User Experience(UX) by providing a User Interface(UI) that is adaptable and useful.  If we are not providing that interface and/or experience, Send me an email (Daniel) and let me know.

As usual, I want to remind you that we have many assets behind the log-in that you all may find useful, like library tools, security focused events calendar, alumni generated articles, and much more.

The News pieces, like this one, are public facing and are available to anyone with internet.  The articles that you see here are often, but not always, mirrored from our main public-facing website APCSS.org.  I do this because I want to share the relevant topics that are circulating in our academic spheres with security practitioners in the region. But as I mentioned above, the real magic is what you will find when you log in. So, as I stated in my last "State of the Portal" article, if it has been a while since you were on the site and you have forgotten how to access anything, contact me, I would be very glad to help.

Interesting Topics

We have a great deal of new content to include podcasts like these:

• Women, Peace, and Security Conversations with Thought Leaders: Enabling Meaningful Participation for Women in the Security Sector w/ Major General Suzanne Vares-Lum and Dr. John E. Byrd

• Take20: Of Interpol and IUU Fishing

• South Asia Dialogues with Agha Jan Akhtar and Dr. Hassan Abbas

Upcoming Events

Our event calendar is begining to fill back up. In fact, as I pen this article we have a Seminar taking place from our TAKE20 team on: The Security Impacts of Illicit Financing And Cryptocurrency In The Indo-Pacific.

• Conference: MSC Virtual Session 4: "Middle Powers and Great Power Competition"

• Seminar: CTGo: Right Wing Terrorism

As I close this Monthly update I want to extend my deepest hope that you all are staying safe whether you are one of our 'Ohana or not.
I leave you all with a quote that sums up 2020:

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.." - Samuel Clemons (Mark Twain)