Browsed by
Category: Politics

Trump’s campaign machine is bleeding cash for legal expenses

Trump’s campaign machine is bleeding cash for legal expenses

Reuters reports: Donald Trump’s political operation has helped pay the legal expenses of more than a dozen people contacted by prosecutors investigating the former president, tying up millions of dollars that otherwise could be used for his 2024 White House bid. Reuters has identified 13 potential witnesses or co-defendants who were represented by law firms that received payments from a political group run by Trump, based on interviews and a review of court records and campaign finance disclosures. The payments…

Read More Read More

Twitter fires election integrity team ahead of 2024 elections

Twitter fires election integrity team ahead of 2024 elections

Rolling Stone reports: Next year will see dozens of elections around the globe, but X (formerly Twitter) has seemingly abdicated responsibility for protecting users from misinformation during these democratic processes. Several European staffers working on a threat disruption team for the social platform, including senior manager Aaron Rodericks, have been fired this week, according to a report in the tech publication The Information that cited anonymous sources familiar with the matter. Site owner Elon Musk confirmed the termination of the…

Read More Read More

Elon Musk attacks German support for migrants and promotes support for far-right extremist party

Elon Musk attacks German support for migrants and promotes support for far-right extremist party

Insider reports: Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, attacked Germany’s center-left governing coalition for supporting migrants on Friday and boosted a call for the German people to support a far-right extremist party instead. Earlier this month, Germany’s foreign ministry announced it was dispersing funds to two nonprofit organizations that assist asylum-seekers, including a group that conducts search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea. Already this year, more than 2,500 people have died or gone missing while trying to…

Read More Read More

Flawed reports paint erstwhile Iran negotiator Rob Malley and his colleagues as patsies of Tehran

Flawed reports paint erstwhile Iran negotiator Rob Malley and his colleagues as patsies of Tehran

Jonathan Broder writes for SpyTalk: The leak of the email exchanges [reported by Semafor and Iran International earlier this week] appears to be a third shot at Malley by [Iranian] hardliners who want him removed from any further Iran diplomacy. The first shot was fired in July, when the Iranian regime-affiliated Tehran Times mischievously asserted that “Malley’s overly close proximity to his non-official Iranian assistants and advisers created the ground for the fall of this experienced diplomat.” In August the…

Read More Read More

Cornel West is hobnobbing with China apologists and partners of Russia propaganda outlets

Cornel West is hobnobbing with China apologists and partners of Russia propaganda outlets

David Corn reports: Cornel West, the celebrity academic (formerly of Harvard and Princeton), fiery antiracism campaigner, and current Green Party presidential candidate, has a long association with the Democratic Socialists of America, having served as the group’s honorary chairman. But as he campaigns for president, West is moving beyond the DSA and forging bonds with far-left activists who call for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, who support the Chinese and North Korean regimes, and who are associated with communist organizations and…

Read More Read More

‘We’re going to take their money. We’re going to take their factories,’ Trump tells supporters in Michigan

‘We’re going to take their money. We’re going to take their factories,’ Trump tells supporters in Michigan

Detroit Free Press reports: The UAW’s lead negotiator in contract talks with General Motors on Wednesday issued a scathing assessment of former President Donald Trump hours before Trump was due to speak in Detroit. UAW Vice President for General Motors Mike Booth sent the Detroit Free Press a profanity-laden email about his thoughts on Trump’s trip to Michigan. “Let me be blunt. Donald Trump is coming off as a pompous (expletive),” Booth said in an email. “Coming to Michigan to…

Read More Read More

New data on ultra-rich tax cheats wrecks the ‘working-class GOP’ ruse

New data on ultra-rich tax cheats wrecks the ‘working-class GOP’ ruse

Greg Sargent writes: Republicans have been amplifying the claim lately that their party has undergone a “populist” makeover, rendering it both anti-elite and pro-working class. One way Republicans purport to illustrate this is by attacking President Biden’s expanded funding for the Internal Revenue Service, insisting that it empowers a strike force of bureaucrats to prey on ordinary Americans. But new data on tax avoidance by the ultrarich badly undermines GOP claims to being an anti-elite, pro-worker party. It shows that…

Read More Read More

First impeachment hearing yields no new information on Biden

First impeachment hearing yields no new information on Biden

The New York Times reports: The first hearing in House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into President Biden featured their star witnesses testifying that they lacked proof that he committed impeachable offenses, multiple procedural skirmishes the G.O.P. majority nearly lost and, at times, nearly a dozen empty Republican seats. What it did not include was any new information about Mr. Biden’s conduct — or any support for Republicans’ accusations that he had entered into corrupt overseas business deals. “If the Republicans had…

Read More Read More

Climate change made Libya flooding up to 50 times more likely, 50% more intense

Climate change made Libya flooding up to 50 times more likely, 50% more intense

Jessica Corbett writes: International scientists announced Tuesday, September 19, that an event like the extreme rain that led to deadly flooding in Libya earlier this month “has become up to 50 times more likely and up to 50% more intense compared to a 1.2°C cooler climate,” or the preindustrial world. Those were among the findings of a World Weather Attribution analysis of torrential rainfall in several countries across the Mediterranean during the first two weeks of September, conducted by researchers…

Read More Read More

Judge gives Trump Organization the corporate death penalty

Judge gives Trump Organization the corporate death penalty

David Cay Johnston writes: Donald Trump is no longer in business. Worse, the self-proclaimed multibillionaire may soon be personally bankrupt as a result, stripped of just about everything because for years he engaged in calculated bank fraud and insurance fraud by inflating the value of his properties, a judge ruled Tuesday. His gaudy Trump Tower apartment, his golf courses, his Boeing 757 jet and even Mar-a-Lago could all be disposed of by a court-appointed monitor, leaving Trump with not much…

Read More Read More

Amazon is the apex predator of our platform era

Amazon is the apex predator of our platform era

Cory Doctorow writes: The Federal Trade Commission’s chair, Lina Khan, has brought her long-awaited, audacious case against Amazon, signaling the Biden administration’s determination to restore an approach to competition law that has been in decline since the Carter administration. This will doubtless draw fresh criticism about her supposed overreach. But Amazon is precisely the kind of company that Congress had in mind in enacting America’s many antitrust laws. Only more so: The Congress of 1890, which passed the first of…

Read More Read More

Trump ‘serves the billionaire class,’ says United Auto Workers president

Trump ‘serves the billionaire class,’ says United Auto Workers president

The Daily Beast reports: The United Auto Workers union’s president derided GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump as being out of touch with the striking workers, claiming in a CNN interview Tuesday that the former president “serves the billionaire class and that’s what’s wrong with this country.” On the same day that Joe Biden became the first sitting president to join a picket line on behalf of the United Auto Workers, Shawn Fain, who has not yet given an endorsement in…

Read More Read More

The FBI is probing whether Egyptian intelligence played a role in Bob Menendez’s alleged bribery scheme

The FBI is probing whether Egyptian intelligence played a role in Bob Menendez’s alleged bribery scheme

NBC News reports: The FBI is investigating whether Egypt’s intelligence services might have been involved in the alleged bribery scheme described in the indictment of Sen. Bob Menendez and his wife, sources familiar with the matter told NBC News. The counterintelligence investigation is in addition to the federal corruption case that accuses Menendez, D-N.J., of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, the sources said. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Menendez helped oversee billions of dollars…

Read More Read More

Under India’s pressure, Facebook let propaganda and hate speech thrive

Under India’s pressure, Facebook let propaganda and hate speech thrive

The Washington Post reports: Nearly three years ago, Facebook’s propaganda hunters uncovered a vast social media influence operation that used hundreds of fake accounts to praise the Indian army’s crackdown in the restive border region of Kashmir and accuse Kashmiri journalists of separatism and sedition. What they found next was explosive: The network was operated by the Indian army’s Chinar Corps, a storied unit garrisoned in the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley, the heart of Indian Kashmir and one of the most…

Read More Read More

Judge rules Donald Trump defrauded banks, insurers while building real estate empire

Judge rules Donald Trump defrauded banks, insurers while building real estate empire

The Associated Press reports: A judge ruled Tuesday that Donald Trump committed fraud for years while building the real estate empire that catapulted him to fame and the White House. Judge Arthur Engoron, ruling in a civil lawsuit brought by New York’s attorney general, found that the former president and his company deceived banks, insurers and others by massively overvaluing his assets and exaggerating his net worth on paperwork used in making deals and securing financing. Engoron ordered that some…

Read More Read More

Trump’s lawyers urge judge to reject proposed gag order while Trump shows off a Glock

Trump’s lawyers urge judge to reject proposed gag order while Trump shows off a Glock

Politico reports: Donald Trump’s lawyers said Monday that a gag order proposed by prosecutors would unconstitutionally silence him during key months of the 2024 presidential campaign, urging a federal judge in Washington, D.C. to reject the proposed limits. In a 25-page filing that mirrored some of Trump’s own heated political rhetoric, Trump’s attorneys said the former president’s attacks on potential witnesses, special counsel Jack Smith and even U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan herself are protected by the First Amendment…

Read More Read More