Browsed by
Category: Politics

Vance spread lies about Haitians despite his office knowing they were baseless

Vance spread lies about Haitians despite his office knowing they were baseless

Rolling Stone reports: During a campaign event in Wisconsin on Tuesday, J.D. Vance told supporters that it’s not his job to check if a story is true before broadcasting it to his millions of supporters. “The media has a responsibility to fact-check,” Vance said of false claims he’s spread accusing “illegal” Haitian migrants in the town of Springfield, Ohio, of killing and eating local pets. Well, members of the media did fact-check Vance. As it turns out, the Ohio senator…

Read More Read More

After false pet claims, Springfield’s GOP mayor says Trump visit would be ‘an extreme strain’ on resources

After false pet claims, Springfield’s GOP mayor says Trump visit would be ‘an extreme strain’ on resources

NBC News reports: The Republican mayor of Springfield, Ohio, the city that has been the target of unfounded claims from former President Donald Trump and his running mate about Haitian immigrants’ eating residents’ pets said Tuesday that a visit from Trump would tax the city’s resources. “It would be an extreme strain on our resources. So it’d be fine with me if they decided not to make that visit,” Mayor Rob Rue said at a news conference at City Hall….

Read More Read More

Russian election interference efforts focus on the Harris-Walz campaign

Russian election interference efforts focus on the Harris-Walz campaign

Microsoft Threat Analysis Center: Russia and Iran have both undertaken cyber influence operations headed into the 2024 presidential election. In our last report, published on August 8, we detailed how Iranian cyber-enabled influence operations sought to undermine the Republican campaign through targeted hack-and-leak operations, covert social media personas, and imposter US news sites. In the past two months, Microsoft has observed a notable shift in Russian influence operations tactics reflecting the changing U.S. political environment. Specifically, we have observed Russia…

Read More Read More

Leaked records detail vast Russian influence campaign targeting Ukraine, EU

Leaked records detail vast Russian influence campaign targeting Ukraine, EU

RFE/RL reports: A trove of leaked records from a Russian disinformation campaign reveals how Moscow sought to discredit Ukraine and Western governments that support it while also trying to boost support for far-right political parties in the European Union. The documents obtained by a consortium of European media outlets and shared with Schemes, the investigative unit of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, highlight the internal operations of the Social Design Agency, a Moscow-based company that the United States says has led the propaganda campaign at…

Read More Read More

Biden’s arms transfers to Israel under internal investigation

Biden’s arms transfers to Israel under internal investigation

The Washington Post reports: Government watchdogs with jurisdiction over the State Department and Pentagon are preparing to publish the results of multiple investigations scrutinizing the Biden administration’s provision of U.S. weapons to Israel for its military campaign in Gaza, and “several” related inquiries are either underway or planned, their offices told The Washington Post. The forthcoming inspector general reports, which are not yet public, follow complaints from within the U.S. government that the export of billions of dollars in arms…

Read More Read More

The Gazan infants who never saw their first birthday

The Gazan infants who never saw their first birthday

Ibrahim Mohammad writes: On Sept. 16, Gaza’s Health Ministry released a 649-page document containing the personal information of 34,344 Palestinians killed by Israel’s onslaught on the enclave over the past 11 months. The seemingly endless list is incomplete: more than 41,000 Palestinians have been martyred since October 7, according to Health Ministry figures, but many of them have not yet been fully identified. Over 11,300 of the identified victims are children, and 710 of them were killed before they turned…

Read More Read More

Thousands injured in Lebanon in large-scale act of terrorism

Thousands injured in Lebanon in large-scale act of terrorism

The Washington Post reports: Thousands of people were injured across Lebanon on Tuesday when electronic pagers used by the militant group Hezbollah simultaneously exploded around 3:30 p.m., the group and Lebanese officials said, in what experts said may have been an unprecedented attack by Israel that possibly involved sabotaging the devices before they were delivered. “Each one who received a new pager, throw it away,” said a voice message that was circulated to Hezbollah members, according to one of the…

Read More Read More

J.D. Vance: Republican immigration policy of mass deportations ‘fails to pass the laugh test’

J.D. Vance: Republican immigration policy of mass deportations ‘fails to pass the laugh test’

J.D. Vance wrote: I became a conservative in large part because I felt that the Right was far more honest about the real state of the world. Yet a significant part of Republican immigration policy centers on the possibility of deporting 12 million people (or “self deporting” them). Think about it: we conservatives (rightly) mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply, yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens. The…

Read More Read More

As Trump persists in using inflammatory rhetoric, he claims he’s a victim of inflammatory rhetoric

As Trump persists in using inflammatory rhetoric, he claims he’s a victim of inflammatory rhetoric

Philip Bump writes: The day after Secret Service agents confronted an armed man near where Donald Trump was playing golf, the former president told Fox News that the rhetoric of Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris was to blame. “He believed the rhetoric of [President Joe] Biden and [Vice President Kamala] Harris, and he acted on it,” Trump said of Ryan Wesley Routh, the man arrested after fleeing the Trump International Golf Club on Sunday. “Their rhetoric is causing me…

Read More Read More

Scientific American: Vote for Kamala Harris to support science, health and the environment

Scientific American: Vote for Kamala Harris to support science, health and the environment

The editors of Scientific American write: In the November election, the U.S. faces two futures. In one, the new president offers the country better prospects, relying on science, solid evidence and the willingness to learn from experience. She pushes policies that boost good jobs nationwide by embracing technology and clean energy. She supports education, public health and reproductive rights. She treats the climate crisis as the emergency it is and seeks to mitigate its catastrophic storms, fires and droughts. In…

Read More Read More

Elon Musk is a national security risk

Elon Musk is a national security risk

Wired reports: Shortly following reports of an apparent second assassination attempt against former US president and 2024 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, Elon Musk decided to speak up. “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala 🤔,” Musk, X’s owner, wrote in a now deleted post, in response to another person asking, “Why they want to kill Donald Trump?” After deleting the post—which could be interpreted as a call to murder President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent in the US…

Read More Read More

‘Flat out illegal’: Ohio sheriff is keeping note of homes with Harris yard signs

‘Flat out illegal’: Ohio sheriff is keeping note of homes with Harris yard signs

The Daily Beast reports: An Ohio sheriff has made a chilling—and possibly illegal—request of his county’s 161,000 residents. Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski asked his constituents on Facebook to note the addresses of homes that have yard signs supporting Kamala Harris and Tim Walz—that way undocumented immigrants can be directed there. The sheriff referred to immigrants as being “illegal human locust” in a pair of posts to his personal and public pages that have since turned their comments off. Zuchowski is the…

Read More Read More

Judge Aileen Cannon failed to disclose a right-wing junket

Judge Aileen Cannon failed to disclose a right-wing junket

By Marilyn W. Thompson and Alex Mierjeski This story was originally published by ProPublica Federal Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the controversial jurist who tossed out the classified documents criminal case against Donald Trump in July, failed to disclose her attendance at a May 2023 banquet funded by a conservative law school. Cannon went to an event in Arlington, Va. honoring the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, according to documents obtained from the Law and Economics Center at George Mason…

Read More Read More

‘The most complex, dynamic and dangerous threat environment I’ve experienced’

‘The most complex, dynamic and dangerous threat environment I’ve experienced’

Politico reports: The toxic political climate and a complex web of threats — punctuated by Sunday’s apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump — is putting an extraordinary strain on the national security officials tasked with safeguarding American democracy. Security experts say sharp polarization and increasingly hateful political rhetoric — fanned by foreign adversaries and supercharged by social media — have combined to test the nation’s ability to protect its candidates and institutions. “The 2024 presidential election is taking place at…

Read More Read More

Trump ignored warnings from Secret Service about security risks posed by golfing

Trump ignored warnings from Secret Service about security risks posed by golfing

The Washington Post reports: Soon after Donald Trump became president, authorities tried to warn him about the risks posed by golfing at his own courses because of their proximity to public roads. Secret Service agents came armed with unusual evidence: not suspect profiles or spent bullet casings, but simple photographs taken by news crews of him golfing at his private club in Sterling, Va. They reasoned that if photographers with long-range lenses could get the president in their sights while…

Read More Read More

Laura Loomer is the latest symptom, not the disease

Laura Loomer is the latest symptom, not the disease

Sam Stein writes: Over the past week,a small number of elected Republicans (along with a few venerable conservative voices) have aired concerns about Donald Trump allowing right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer to accompany him on the campaign trail. It’s not so much that Loomer says offensive things, they argue. It’s that they fear the influence that her conspiracy-addled mind might have on the former president. “All of this would be ignorable,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote of Loomer amplifying…

Read More Read More