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Russia secretly worms its way into America’s conservative media

Russia secretly worms its way into America’s conservative media

The New York Times reports: In early 2022, a young couple from Canada, Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, registered a new company in Tennessee that went on to create a social media outlet called Tenet Media. By November 2023, they had assembled a lineup of major conservative social media stars, including Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin, to post original content on Tenet’s platform. The site then began posting hundreds of videos — trafficking in pointed political commentary as…

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Hints of a hidden structure detected at the edge of the Solar System

Hints of a hidden structure detected at the edge of the Solar System

Science Alert reports: If you travel far enough away from the Sun, the Solar System becomes a lot more populated. Out past the orbit of Neptune lies the Kuiper Belt, a vast, ring-shaped field of icy rocks. This is where Pluto resides, and Arrokoth, and countless other small objects in the cold and the dark. These are known as Kuiper Belt objects or KBOs, and astronomers have just found hints of an unexpected rise in their density, between 70 and…

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‘Beyond catastrophic’: UN issues dire warning on Gaza as Israel hinders polio vaccination drive

‘Beyond catastrophic’: UN issues dire warning on Gaza as Israel hinders polio vaccination drive

  The United Nations is warning the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains “beyond catastrophic” as more than 1 million Palestinians in Gaza did not receive any food rations in August amid Israel’s relentless assault. Israel’s 11-month campaign has killed more than 15,000 children and enabled the besieged territory’s first polio outbreak in a quarter-century. INARA founder Arwa Damon just got back from spending two weeks in Gaza, where the nonprofit currently provides medical and mental healthcare to Palestinian children. “Israel…

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Israeli forces kill American-Turkish activist in the occupied West Bank

Israeli forces kill American-Turkish activist in the occupied West Bank

Al Jazeera reports: Israeli forces have fatally shot an American-Turkish activist at a demonstration in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian news agency Wafa and a hospital official say. Twenty-six-year-old Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was taking part in the protest against illegal Israeli settlements on Mount Sbeih in Beita, south of Nablus, on Friday when she was shot. Fouad Nafaa, the head of the Rafidia Hospital in Nablus, told the news agency Reuters that Ezgi Eygi arrived at the hospital in…

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Inside Tenet Media, the pro-Trump ‘supergroup’ allegedly funded by Russia

Inside Tenet Media, the pro-Trump ‘supergroup’ allegedly funded by Russia

The Washington Post reports: Even by the standards of right-wing social media, last year’s rollout for Tenet Media was strange. Videos of the event featured influencers such as Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin talking portentously about freedom and censorship while bathed in a nightclub-style purple light. Tim Pool, a much-followed right-wing commentator, proclaimed that Tenet would be a kind of YouTube “supergroup” that would compete with the untrustworthy mainstream media. “I worked for several massive corporate news organizations,” Pool, a…

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‘A huge mistake’: Trump’s crypto allies cringe over family’s startup

‘A huge mistake’: Trump’s crypto allies cringe over family’s startup

Politico reports: Donald Trump’s sons want to turn their father’s growing bromance with the cryptocurrency industry into the new family business. So far, the project’s troubled rollout has succeeded in creating only one thing: a potential political liability for the former president. Trump’s eldest sons — Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — have been teasing their plans to unveil a crypto startup called World Liberty Financial for weeks. But the launch has been marred in recent days by a…

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What Tucker Carlson’s spin on World War II really says

What Tucker Carlson’s spin on World War II really says

Megan Garber writes: In the movie The History Boys, based on Alan Bennett’s play, a student wins a scholarship to Oxford with the help of an argument he makes on an entrance exam: Hitler, he claims, was “much misunderstood.” As fiction, this is mordant comedy—a mockery of the particular type of arrogance required to twist the tragedies of the Holocaust into personal gain. But now the satire has come for our news cycle. In a long and meandering interview on…

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The mainstream media is gaining an increasing number of mainstream critics

The mainstream media is gaining an increasing number of mainstream critics

Rebecca Solnit writes: The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the…

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Washington lobbyists battle over future of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine

Washington lobbyists battle over future of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine

The Washington Post reports: When JD Vance became the Republican nominee for vice president, a speech he gave in April condemning the Ukrainian government for what he claimed was an “assault on traditional Christian communities” became a rallying cry for lobbyists hired by a lawyer of an ally of the Russian Orthodox patriarch. “We commend Vance for taking a strong position on this issue and urge you to follow suit,” said a July 17 email sent to lawmakers on Capitol…

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Scientists are closing in on the true, horrifying scale of death and disease in Gaza

Scientists are closing in on the true, horrifying scale of death and disease in Gaza

Devi Sridhar writes: In August, a 10-month-old baby in Gaza was partly paralysed from polio, the first confirmed case there in 25 years. The paralysis is probably permanent, and there are no treatments for polio. We have a safe and effective vaccine to prevent serious disease, but the ongoing war in the region has meant vaccination campaigns have stopped. A polio outbreak seems inevitable given that the disease spreads through dirty water and rubbish, which surrounds those living in tents…

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Columbia law professor, Katherine Franke, faces firing after Democracy Now! interview on Gaza

Columbia law professor, Katherine Franke, faces firing after Democracy Now! interview on Gaza

  Columbia University law professor Katherine Franke last appeared on Democracy Now! in January to discuss an attack on Columbia’s campus targeting pro-Palestinian student activists with a foul-smelling liquid that led to multiple hospitalizations. Following her interview, Franke now faces termination after two Columbia professors filed a complaint against her claiming she had created a hostile environment for Israeli students; she also became a target for Republican lawmakers. Franke joins Democracy Now! to discuss the campaign against her, the ongoing…

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Former 2016 Trump campaign adviser is charged over his work for sanctioned Russian TV

Former 2016 Trump campaign adviser is charged over his work for sanctioned Russian TV

The Associated Press reports: The Justice Department has charged a Russian-born U.S. citizen and former adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign with working for a sanctioned Russian state television network and laundering the proceeds. Indictments announced Thursday allege that Dimitri Simes and his wife received over $1 million dollars and a personal car and driver in exchange for work they did for Russia’s Channel One since June 2022. The network was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2022 over Russia’s…

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Right-wing influencer network Tenet Media allegedly spread Russian disinformation

Right-wing influencer network Tenet Media allegedly spread Russian disinformation

Wired reports: A Tennessee-based media network that produces shows for high-profile right-wing influencers such as Benny Johnson and Tim Pool was largely funded by Russian state-backed news network RT, according to a federal indictment against two RT employees that the US Department of Justice unsealed on Wednesday. The DOJ claims the US company—which WIRED, along with other news outlets, was able to identify as Tenet Media but goes unnamed in the indictment—posted hundreds of videos on social media that pushed…

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New poll has bad news for Democrats in key Senate race

New poll has bad news for Democrats in key Senate race

Politico reports: Vulnerable Democratic Sen. Jon Tester trails his GOP opponent by 8 points in a new independent poll of Montana’s Senate race — a result that could very well tip control of the Senate to Republicans. Republican Tim Sheehy took 49 percent of the vote, compared to Tester’s 41 percent, on a four-way ballot, according to the late-August survey of 600 likely voters in the state commissioned by AARP. The Libertarian candidate received 4 percent of the vote, while…

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